Contact across the Solar System

Californians on Venus

After her speech, Cristina and her staffers met with some Contact Committee people and some Saanalokam and SSC politicians. Among them were Kalna, Ilmuth, Khessini, Solgonda, and also Firkon and Ramu, who traveled from their homes in Mars and Titan to visit her. Zuhl wasn't much interested in visiting her, preferring to stay in a city on Iapetus.

She started off by apologizing for being an anti-espionager and she said that a reason that she was making this trip was that she feels that she had to clean up the mess that she made. Orthon smiled as Cristina described her motivation. He had done much the same. She also praised her hosts for being very forgiving and accepting of her despite the trouble that she had caused for the contact effort.

Cristina then described how impressed she was with Saanalokam and the Solar System Community, and she described how it was much like Star Trek. "You are everything I dreamed of." She then explained that that was why the SSC was such a horrible dilemma for her.

Then she got to business about UFO sightings, asking which ones are sightings of SSC spacecraft. Her hosts talked among themselves and Ilmuth responded that they are reluctant to reveal details of their Earth-observation operations. "So your residents you reveal but your spacecraft you won't?" Cristina asked. She didn't get a very straight answer, even after a lot of tries on her part.

She also didn't get a very straight answer about the Mantell incident. But after a lot of questioning, one of the councilmembers said that one of their ship crewpeople was very naive about Earthling air vehicles, because they get their lift mechanically rather than using antigravity - they get their lift by running into the air.

She turned to asking why they contacted George Adamski with all the, er, nonsense that he'd written. Kalna grinned and said "I know what word you were thinking of," and Cristina burst out laughing.

She quizzed the former residents about their experiences as Earth residents, and they described such experiences as visiting Percival Lowell's observatory and traveling in horse-drawn vehicles and sailing ships. Ramu described how he sometimes tried to convince some doctors to be more sanitary, and he conceded that he did not have much success. "It's things like that which made many of us unwilling to contact you."

Then she brought up the issue of why the Solar System Community did not contact Earth people earlier. A councilmember said that SSC people had considered contact over a century ago, but then the Kinden Tarupa crashed, making the Tunguska explosion. He explained that some SSC people decided that the Earth was jinxed.

After that, they went on to discuss such business as Cristina describing what her fellow members of Congress were like, explaining issues like the Gang of Forty and its takeover of most of the Cabinet departments. Toward the end, they agreed on doing some technical assistance for the Los Angeles area, and they agreed on what gifts to bring home for all the other Congresspeople.

The rest of her entourage also kept busy, discussing lots of infrastructure issues. Their hosts showed how Saanalokam's indoor farms work, how the city's manufacturing and recycling works, and plenty of other such things.

The geologist gave a talk about things to watch out for when building on the Earth. Earthquakes. Temperature variation. Rain. Snow. Wind. Floods. Corrosion. Soft ground. He showed a picture of some apartment buildings tilted from an earthquake. The buildings held together but the ground beneath them liquefied from that earthquake.
"How do you think one should get around that?"
"By building on pilings", showing a picture of that sort of construction: thick posts driven into the ground. He also showed some video of a pile driver in action: a machine that repeatedly drops a heavy weight onto a piling, pulling it up each time for the next drop.

Someone asked him why nobody lives in SSC fashion on the Earth, and the geologist mentioned something called "Biosphere II". It wasn't very successful, he said. "We're too spoiled by our planet, I think."

They also had plenty of time off, and Cristina spent some of it modeling SSC clothes in addition to all the touristy stuff she and the others did.

As they returned, Cristina asked Kalna and Ilmuth about their experiences in the Los Angeles area, like favorite taquerias. Also about changing social attitudes towards women, like their getting more freedom and more social status over the times that they visited. Kalna noted that in past centuries, some women had visited the Earth disguised as men -- doing so gave them a lot more freedom than visiting as women.

They took some group pictures on the way back, and Mike's height was, as usual, annoying.